Ezra, you've never had a really bad neighbor, have you? One that drove you from your residence?

And don't forget that the production of meat and eggs and dairy produces more global warming than all of transportation (not to mention the cruelty.

There's a fascinating article on the subject in the Atlantic by Christopher B. Leinberger:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/subprime

He argues that the rising cost of energy-intensive, car-dependent lifestyles, along with a sharp rise in childless and single person households will result in a migration back to walkable, denser communities, and that poorly planned, poorly constructed sprawl will become the new slums rather than the inner-city.

That's actually already the case in places like France, where the city centre of Paris is an enormously desirable place to live, and all the disadvantaged, minority people (like the rioters) live in the run-down suburbs that surround the city.

Obviously the USA will never move completely back to the way things were 60 or 70 years ago, but there is compelling evidence of a huge shift in development patterns. Communities that prepare for this now by investing in public transit and adopting smart growth strategies are going to have a huge competitive advantage over places that continue to sprawl.

Denser and, more generally, smarter development does in fact make a lot of sense from environmental, social, and economic perspectives. Unfortunately, the predominant fad for answering those questions is the vapidities of New Urbanism (the picture above being a nice visual icon of it), which itself has a huge host of problems. A rural farmhouse with good insulation linked to a superior rail network is far more efficient (and far closer to the American 'yeoman' bedrock which, like it or not, still persists) than a rebuilt D.C. rowhouse. And there are a lot more places in this country to build efficient, intelligent, environmentally sound rural projects than in which to cram gentrification into existing downtowns.

en-dash, the problem with that is that lots of people would be delighted to be crammed into existing downtowns, if only the housing stock existed to make it possible. Just look at the astronomical land values in places like Manhattan. The problem is that the enormous demand is funnelled through limited supply, so prices skyrocket. Making it easier to construct new housing in downtown areas would increase the supply and help affordability.

I agree fwiw that there's a lot of vapidity in new urbanism; the biggest problem is that it's usually upper-middle class oriented and does nothing to help working class families who would laugh at the price per square foot of a lot of these developments.

I generally agree with the thought here, but My God:

Consider this: the turn-of-the-century Garden City suburbs, with their generous lawns, winding streets and tree-lined boulevards averaged 12 units an acre.

I don't know where the author grew up, but any place with 12 houses per acre does not have "generous lawns." I grew up in what I think of as a pretty typical suburb, and we had TWO houses per acre.

> I don't know where the author
> grew up, but any place with
> 12 houses per acre does not
> have "generous lawns." I grew
> up in what I think of as a
> pretty typical suburb, and we
> had TWO houses per acre.

Which pretty much defines the problem. 28 houses/block (both sides) was fairly typical of 1880-1920 railroad suburb (which we now usually think of as "city neighborhoods"). Those who thought their yards were too small did tend to move out to 1st or 2nd ring suburbs when they could where the 12/acre plot was more typical. 2 per acre is far past the point of estates that are unsustainable for any except the very rich. Unless you think another source of $3/bbl oil will be found and global warming will go away.

Cranky

Kevin Drum today opines that perhaps OPEC isn't increasing production in the face of possible demand rises because, except for Iraq, there aren't the reserves to draw on.

So. When we begin to run out of easily accessible oil, will our suburbs be the first to go? And can't we envision smaller urban centers, perhaps even circular, like some of the early communes in the Middle East, with living, commerce, recreation in the center, light industry and warehouses next, the light rail bisecting, all surrounded by farmland, and every place walkable or bikable from every other place?

Should we be moving in this direction? Should we be asking our candidates to dwell on this a bit and then let us know what they think?

> A rural farmhouse with good
> insulation linked to a
> superior rail network is far
> more efficient (and far closer
> to the American 'yeoman'
> bedrock which, like it or not,
> still persists) than a rebuilt
> D.C. rowhouse.

That is common Jeffersonian wisdom but if we are going to have a North American population over 20 million and with some basic industrial/technology fruits (say, antibiotics) we can't all live on farms (and in any case most people don't like farming and never have). And once a substantial number of people are living off farms I think you will find that moderate-to-dense urban areas are more efficient.

Cranky

Cranky,

You're right that not everyone's going to live on farms or in rural areas in general, but it's just as much a problem to try to jam everyone into cities, which simply don't have the capacity to absorb the entire projected population load in the next century. Small, dense towns have the capacity to take in a large number of people very efficiently when planned and connected intelligently—unfortunately, the majority of contemporary urban planning simply ignores them.

The new urbanism has been just around the corner for several decades now. Color me skeptical; most families like living in suburbs and will stay there even if they have to pay a bit more for gasoline. It's much easier to downsize from a SUV to a sedan, or even buy a Prius, than it is to move.

The blogosphere loves new urbanism because the blogosphere is dominated by young unmarried people - exactly the kind of people who have always been attracted to urban environments. For families, the calculus is different. First, keep in mind that the average American family has just over 2 children. A three-bedroom townhouse or condo in most urban areas is simply unaffordable to median income-earners. Second, not all urban areas are like NYC or SF. Sure, those are nice places to live, if you're young or rich. But many urban areas suck. Who wants to live in urban Detroit or Cincinnati?

Keep in mind, too, that no large urban area in the United States has ever figured out how to have consistently decent public schools. This is a serious societal problem and one we should be putting a lot more resources into fixing. But the problem exists, and that means that families are faced with paying $10,000 per year per child for private school tuition if they want their kids to have a decent education. In the suburbs, the public schools are much better run for the most part. (Admittedly, some of this is because they don't have to deal with as many high-need students from poor and dysfunctional families - but most parents are understandably concerned about their own children first and foremost.)

If you want families to start moving back to urban areas, you need to face these problems head-on. Building more upscale establishments aimed at young singles isn't going to cut it.

And can you please fix that goddam captcha! Half the time it rejects the correct answer.

> You're right that not
> everyone's going to live on
> farms or in rural areas in
> general, but it's just as much
> a problem to try to jam
> everyone into cities, which
> simply don't have the capacity
> to absorb the entire
> projected population load in
> the next century.

Again, I think if you run the numbers you will find that Manhattan, Brooklyn, Boston, central Chicago (and its first ring suburbs), etc are the most energy-efficient places to live in the US. The economies of scale of central water plants, central waste treatment, low transportation costs, etc. are huge and can scale to very large sizes.

Cranky

Josh G, your arguments sound great until we look at the actual percentage of households that are families: way less than half.

The family paradigm argument against density doesn't work anymore. Besides, when we look at NU developments and who they sell out to, they are families and families.

Best,

D

As heartless as it may sound, gentrification can actually be beneficial to society as a whole. For example, look at the Brown Line L (Ravenswood) linking Chicago’s Northside linking with the Loop (the CBD) . Only a couple of decades ago, the line had very low ridership because the nearby neighborhoods were dominated by old blue-collar white ethnics and immigrants. Few members of either group worked in the Loop, and so they didn't use the train. Instead, most of them drove to work, even to distant suburbs where the blue-collar jobs had moved. The Chicago Transit Authority even considered demolishing the line altogether.

Now, as gentrification has forced out much of the previous population, ridership has been booming on the Brown Line—the fastest-growing of any line in Chicago. The new residents, mostly childless couples (both straight and gay), some families with children, as well as many young singles, tend to work or go to college in or near the Loop. The Brown Line gets so many passengers now that it's being rebuilt with expanded capacity. Basically, the blue-collar ethnics and immigrants were living in the "wrong" place—occupying housing units close to a rare resource, an L line, that they totally underutilized. Moreover, if the gentrifiers hadn’t moved into those housing units, they’d be driving far more too. Where the former population has now gone, I don't know. What I do know is that this valuable L line is finally being well patronized, with all the benefits that accrue: Less oil wasted, less pollution, fewer traffic jams. Other benefits include a major drop in crime, much better shopping (also very walkable), and some improvements in local public schools (still pitiful by developed-world standards, however).

If anything, this kind of gentrification needs to occur along many more rapid transit and commuter rail lines on more of Chicago’s South and West Sides, the Bronx, Brooklyn, North Jersey, Philly, etc. Gentrification can be a great ally of environmentalists and even social justice advocates, especially when they actually bother to think globally.

What exactly is so vapid about the photo Ezra posted? Two stories of apartments above shops on the street front. I'd have designed the facade a bit differently but think it's tolerable. Perhaps the colors irritate some commenters? They (the colors, not the commenters) are more vibrant than is typical in the US--but then perhaps some people didn't notice that the picture is not of the US (cf., inter alia, the street signage and license plate shape). It may well be Britain. I know Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Germany better, and in those countries such color schemes are not sneered at so easily--vibrant colors help warm the long, dark winters. Ya know, other folks in other cultures sometimes do things different....

"Keep in mind, too, that no large urban area in the United States has ever figured out how to have consistently decent public schools."

I know this is a lot harder than it sounds, but we can switch from having a local property tax-based school funding system to something a lot more sensible. Switching is going to be hard, but with pushes both into the exburbs (which aren't exactly a bunch of Scarsdales) or back into cities, I don't see much future support for this model. Also, as more private schools are created, that just makes the big names (Philips Andover, most of the Independent School League schools not named Thayer, Harvard-Wesleyan, etc.) that much more prestigious.

I really really hate your capture system. You really need to do something about it now. It is bringing down the quality of your blog through no fault of your own. It probably dampens the enthusiansm on the comment threads.

What exactly is so vapid about the photo Ezra posted?

There are no vapid Murrican vehicles such as Ford pickups, Hummers, or Chivvy SUVs.

95% of Western societies live like in the picture. No one likes to be told there's a better way.

Alex, your captcha utility deletes my original entry if I can't read the display well enough to type properly. This condition is in the minority, as most blogs have fixed this...feature.

Best,

D

There's nothing particularly vapid about the picture per se; rather, the picture is iconographic of 'New Urbanism' which happens to be fairly vapid philosophically. One of the most prominent critiques is here:

http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~pgordon/urbanism.html

The new urbanism has been just around the corner for several decades now. Color me skeptical; most families like living in suburbs and will stay there even if they have to pay a bit more for gasoline. It's much easier to downsize from a SUV to a sedan, or even buy a Prius, than it is to move.

Oh ... when did Americans stop moving? Did that happen when I was living in Australia?

In the Koles and Muench (2002) study of the move to the ex-urban Fox Valley in northeastern Wisconsin, 68% of respondents had lived in their present residence for under 10 years.

Large numbers of suburbanites will move ... the question is where they will move to.

That is, on the decade time scale, Americans are quite footloose, and suburbanites that are moving would quite sensibly make a comparison of places to live in current conditions and whatever conditions they see coming in the next decade.

If suburban areas find that the best way to continue to attract entrants to replace ongoing exits is to provide reliable fixed transport corridor transit services to main job centers and shopping centers, developers will start working their buddies in state and local government to get just that. If there is a per-square-foot service levy that is applied at a descending schedule for residents within a quarter mile, mile, and five miles of a fixed transport corridor stop, developers will have an incentive to develop at greater density closer to the stop than farther from the stop.

Not enough choices presented by current forms of zoning, planning, and infrastructure funding programs. A critique of sprawl, that is not itself a new urbanist critique, is here:

http://www.elistore.org/Data/products/d17__02.pdf

We need to allow greater variety in housing density, but also to take into account the location of that density.

It's worth reinforcing the simple point that, when choosing how dense of a neighborhood to have, you're not stuck choosing between Manhattan and exurban Arizona. There are many levels of density, and even those (like myself) who love gardens and backyard parties and not sharing walls with others can benefit from moving to a denser area.

I moved from suburban Texas to the Great Lakes region, and I gotta tell ya, there is no better place for me, my garden, and my grill than a Victorian home in one of these turn-of-the-century neighborhoods. Yet the population is unquestionably denser than where I came from; I can walk to work in the summer.

For what it's worth, the pace of gentrification in many areas, mine included, would suggest that the changes Ezra is pining for may already be underway.

the picture is iconographic of 'New Urbanism' which happens to be fairly vapid philosophically. One of the most prominent critiques is here:

That Gordon critique was rebutted and quashed long ago, can't seem to find the link, but the arguments are from false premise.

New Urbanism is vapid only if you consider returning to built environment patterns found for millenia prior to WWII. We did just fine for thousands of years until 60 years ago, then all of a sudden we threw the directions away.

In my mind, if you want to stay in your McSuburb, great, but don't make fun of the 35-65% of people who don't like the cheesiness of the neighborhood or the fact that you have to get in the car to go every d*mn where. Stay. Be happy. Good on ya.

The majority of the population will now commence looking for decent neighborhoods now that cr*ppy single-use zoning is going away. Finally.

Best,

D

en_dash: I think we can get past New Urbanism's absolutist streak and look more simply at appropriate development, with location as a key criterion.

If you're going to live in the sticks, you damn well live in the sticks. You go to the fucking feed store and chop wood. If you want a Wal-Mart, you live near a Wal-Mart.

American building models have privileged shittily-built sprawling homes on big lots for too fucking long. They reward crap.

It is not impossible to reward smart building with good materials. Chez Atrios, someone mentioned how her Brooklyn brownstone was built so you couldn't hear people next door, above or below. So why not do it?

And as Reality Man says, it's time to get beyond the link between property taxes and school funding. That's just insidious.

(Ezra: this bastard CAPCHA means that you can't read the thread and post without a timeout. That's not good.)

I know Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Germany better, and in those countries such color schemes are not sneered at so easily--vibrant colors help warm the long, dark winters.

You find houses like that in English villages: yellows and reds (the classic 'Norfolk pink', historically shaded with pig's blood), the fishermans' row cottages along the Northumberland coast.

That's to say, they're in some of the less-populated parts of the country, but people still live close together.

We should make suburbs illegal.

As winter arrives in the northern hemisphere in just a few days, we all start to think about taking a vacation somewhere in a warmer climate. There are so many great destinations available to us where we would like to go with our family or friends to escape the cold and snow, even if it just for a week or two. Canadians often choose Caribbean Islands, Florida or Mexico, sometimes one many fantastic cruises as their preferred way to relax and unwind. And they all love to get away at the lowest possible cost and this is where Holiday Travel of America comes to play. http://www.holidayways.com

The company was established quite a few years ago, in fact in 1988 and thoughout all those years they consistently offered the best travel values to its large bas e of customers. Many of them are well known corporations you know and trust, who use travel premiums as incentives for their clients and employees. These premiums are travel certificates and packages which include Accommodation Certificates, Cruise Certificates, Airfare Certificates. In order to redeem any of the certificates offered, customers simply fill out the attached reservation coupon, with destination request and couple of different date choices. All of the fulfillment is handled by HTOA directly to ensure a smooth process and customer satisfaction. There are many travel premiums to choose from like "A Suite Week", "A Holiday Adventure", "A Royal Caribbean Holiday", "Carnival Plus", "A Midweek Holiday", "Holiday Passports" to name just a few.

Holiday Travel of America web site is very well designed, explaining all their services in a great detail, providing you with all the information you may need. Their FAQ section covers most of questions you may have when booking your vacation or need to make any changes. They have contact form where you can ask for any additional assistance or simply call one of their travel specialists to discuss your matters. No wonder they are a leader in the incentive travel industry. So if you are looking for company with a solid reputation for creating state-of-the-art travel packages, Holiday Travel of America should be your preferred choice to do business with.

"We should make suburbs illegal."

-kiche

I'll second that. Two easy steps would be to ban the construction of detached houses (all houses must be attached like apartments or townhouses) and also ban the ownership of private cars. Carsharing systems could still be made available. Suburban expansion must be halted and reversed if we are going to do anything about global warming or peak oil. It is estimated that by 2050 when world population reaches 10 billion all the forests on earth will have disappeared except for small parks and protected areas. This cannot be allowed to happen.

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